This invention relates to medical ultrasonic diagnostic systems and, in particular, to a fully integrated hand held ultrasonic diagnostic instrument.
As is well known, modern ultrasonic diagnostic systems are large, complex instruments. Today""s premium ultrasound systems, while mounted in carts for portability, continue to weigh several hundred pounds. In the past, ultrasound systems such as the ADR 4000 ultrasound system produced by Advanced Technology Laboratories, Inc., assignee of the present invention, were smaller, desktop units about the size of a personal computer. However, such instruments lacked many of the advanced features of today""s premium ultrasound systems such as color Doppler imaging and three dimensional display capabilities. As ultrasound systems have become more sophisticated they have also become bulkier.
However, with the ever increasing density of digital electronics, it is now possible to foresee a time when ultrasound systems will be able to be miniaturized to a size even smaller than their much earlier ancestors. The physician is accustomed to working with a hand held ultrasonic scanhead which is about the size of an electric razor. It would be desirable, consistent with the familiar scanhead, to be able to compact the entire ultrasound system into a scanhead-sized unit. It would be further desirable for such an ultrasound instrument to retain as many of the features of today""s sophisticated ultrasound systems as possible, such as speckle reduction, color Doppler and three dimensional imaging capabilities.
In accordance with the principles of the present invention, a diagnostic ultrasound instrument is provided which exhibits many of the features of a premium ultrasound system in a hand held unit. These premium system features are afforded by a digital signal processor capable of performing both greyscale and Doppler signal processing including their associated filtering, compression, flash suppression and mapping functions, as well as advanced features such as synthetic aperture formation, multiple focal zone imaging, frame averaging, depth dependent filtering, and speckle reduction. In a preferred embodiments the digital signal processor is formed on a single integrated circuit chip. This sophisticated ultrasound instrument can be manufactured as a hand held unit weighing less than five pounds.